


Blood from a Stone

by CLIsabel



Category: The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: F/M, Gen, How Do I Tag, Loki Needs a Hug, Therapy
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-11-01
Updated: 2014-11-01
Packaged: 2018-02-23 11:44:28
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,085
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2546348
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CLIsabel/pseuds/CLIsabel
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>What if Loki had a companion during the two years he spent in Asgard's dungeons? What if that companion was someone who he, strictly speaking, could not kill?</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Welcome Home

**Author's Note:**

> The explanation for this fic is this: I found myself wondering how literally true the "Loki just needs a hug" sentiment was, so I thought I'd stick him and somebody he couldn't exactly slaughter together in a room for two years. 
> 
> "Somebody" may be a bit of a misnomer - I'm still working out what exactly the stone can or can't do, but it does appear to be a magical artifact rather than a person. A magical AI may be an apt description.
> 
> I have no idea where this is going. I have no idea how it will affect him. The ratings and warnings here are based on potential: this fic is dedicated to exploring the mad god's mind (and he may have a history with other figures who are even madder). Nobody has been raped or tortured yet in the fic yet, and I am not completely positive that this will happen. But it might.
> 
> Anything might happen.

The cell was pleasant. The furniture elegant, the craftsmanship impeccable. He had a bed, prettily embroidered if not so plush as the one from his own bedroom. He had a chair, and an ottoman that could function as a table or footrest. He had a table, and a water basin that refilled and exchanged its contents through concealed pipes. There was no bookshelf, but it seemed he would be allowed a few books. 

They had to keep up appearances. Odin tread a fine line here; Loki was half a monster in the public consciousness, guilty of that most heinous crime, betrayal of the royal family and his shield-brother, Thor. 

Yet he was also Odin’s son. The memories of the thousand years he spent in this role could not be banished from Asgardian consciousness completely.

All of Asgard remained ignorant, after all, of the fact that he was never Odin’s son.

Even as he stepped into the cell, its insipid cleanness and austerity seemed to seep into his skin. 

Well this is going to be an eternity in Hel, isn’t it?

And yet he turns about the cell, takes it all in. It’s not so bad. Better than an eternity in Thanos’ thrall.

Better than an eternity in Thor’s shadow.

He smirks, thinking of the waste his brother is making of his life - spending it serving Midgard, an unworthy realm if there ever was one, populated by mortals barely fit to be their slaves. At least he wasn’t sitting on the throne of Asgard. When that day came, it would be unbearable.

Loki is sure he’ll have figured his way out by then.

But he'd best not start arousing suspicion until things have calmed down a bit, and everyone is convinced that he is well and truly trapped. He walks to sit on what he supposes is his new bed, runs his hands along the thin, if intricately embroidered fabric - 

His hand touches something cold and thrilling.

Loki picks up the object, twirls it in slender fingers. It is a stone, smooth and cold and elongated, about the length of his palm. Its color is a shade lighter than emerald, veins running through it from when the crystal was forming in the ground. 

The thing thrums with magic as though it is alive. 

As he handles it, petals of light and warmth blossom from the thing, bathing his fingers in a euphoric heat. 

_Hello, Loki._

He narrows his eyes. A friendly thing, clearly meant to be a source of warmth and comfort in his most desperate hour.

Clearly a lure.

He examines the magic. There is a trace of his mother on it, a trace, also of Odin. He recoils internally - but although the thing must be here with Odin's consent, it was clearly not crafted by either of his parents.

Most of the magic strange. Asgardian at its base, but assembled in a haphazard way, touched with flavors and symbols clearly not of his world - and the whole weave is surprisingly amateurish. No, none of Odin's mages did this. If anything it feels as though a few small whisps of the King and Queen's magics were woven into it.

The voice - the voice that spoke into his mind was familiar. It smacked of his mother, reminded him of her warmth - but it was most certainly not his mother’s voice. It was a voice he'd heard before, somewhere, he is sure...

The face comes to him. Blue eyes, a look of horror in them - one of the Midgardian wenches who tried to interrogate him on the helicarrier. He mentally recoils again.

He had put that encounter out of his mind; it was so brief as to mean nothing next to all that was going on around him at the time. The woman had been horrified, had come near to weeping and fled, before he even spoke. He remembers her scrutinizing him with that maddening air of superiority, at first - the same that had led him to unleash his venom on Black Widow. But before he had decided how best to attack her, this girl stopped. Her fingers touched the glass that was containing him, and she was staring into his eyes with an expression so haunted it had actually given him pause.

She had stepped back from the glass, horror painted on her face, and apologized. 

“I - I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I’m so sorry, Loki. I so wish that I could help you. I cannot.”

Then she turned on heel and left.

The stone has taken over the memory at some point, projecting it in sound and color a little bit too detailed to be all his own. It is the correct memory, then. The correct voice.

He hefts the stone from one hand to the other, and smiles. Yes, that resonates. So the little Midgardian wench dabbled in magic as well as psychology. 

A Midgardian touch would explain the sloppiness of the magic, and the strangeness to it. But she had his parents’ - Odin and Frigga’s - help in this. But most of the framework had to be of her own design. 

This is a gift, though not in the way Odin had intended. He can probably learn new tricks from the components of the Midgardian magic contained within this stone. And as mindless as the goal must be, if Odin is attempting it…he must admit to curiosity about what that strange little human wench is playing at. It had seemed like an interrogation tactic, at the time - an attempt to frighten him. But what would she still be doing interested in him, now that the Allfather himself was convinced that Loki was locked away for good?

_Fine,_ he thinks sardonically to the stone. _I’ll bite. What is your purpose here?_

_To talk to you._ It’s the same voice again; the human woman’s voice, warm to remind him of his mother.

He closes his eyes, and sets the stone aside. Mindless or not, magic is magic; and he had best approach with care.


	2. Blood And Muscle

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He was acting as though he was afraid of it; and that was just ridiculous.

He meditated. He read. He ate the food that was provided at the magically refilling table.

He pretended that the stone was not beckoning to him from the the corner of the room all day.

And then he realized that he was displaying fear of the thing, and that was just ridiculous.

He dropped a finished grapestem unceremoniously on the table, and crossed the room to snatch the stone from the corner of his bed.

The cursed object made his fingers tingle, and immediately wrapped him in the sense of warmth he so associated with his mother. 

Of course, he realized, that was the goal; to get him addicted to this sense of warmth and family, so that they could use it to control him.

And the instant he thought that, the sense of warmth vanished.

He paused, glanced at the stone inquiringly. It was still thrumming magically beneath his fingers.

_Let’s get one thing straight,_ the stone said to him. _I am not here to tame you._

Loki sneered. _I’m sure._

The warm fingers were there, re-extending, and damn it all he already wanted them - 

He forced himself to put the stone down on the bed calmly, instead of throwing it across the room. He let it lie there for several seconds before picking it up again.

_Please don’t run away._ The stone’s voice was almost apologetic.

_If I recall, you ran away from me first._

_You and I both know that talking to you that day would have done no good._

_True._ Loki’s curiosity was piqued, despite himself. _And you think it would do good now? You no longer need information from me._  
 _  
I wanted to be your friend.  
_  
That line is so corny that Loki laughs and flips the stone in the air, juggling it between his two hands. _I’m sure. You crossed a thousand lightyears by way of dark matter and obtained Odin's blessing, because you want to be my friend._

_We are kin._ There is an image of a squalling jotun in infant lying in the gathering snow.

The stone clatters to the floor of his cell. Loki looks at it, taking deep, measured breaths.

“You are not a jotun,” he grits out, speaking aloud.

_No,_ the voice in the stone amicably agrees. _But I am strange and different. And alone._

Loki runs a hand through his hair, exasperated. He falls back on the bed.

_Why,_ the stone asks, _do you think I reacted to you the way I did on the helicarrier?_

“I cut a frightening figure.” It is comforting to speak aloud, to hear the sound of his own voice, even though he was only talking to a rock. _Only a day in here and I’m already losing it._  
 _  
You weren’t_ that _frightening,_ she almost laughed.

"Then why?"

And then it was himself in his mind’s eye - he was seeing through the eyes of the mortal wench, seeing himself from a distance as the doors opened to the helicarrier’s holding area. He scrutinized himself this time, as she had scrutinized him then. 

The Loki in the vision was pacing in his transparent cage, moving with the fluid grace of a big cat and the menacing bluster of a cornered wild boar. He had power, she could see that - and just how powerful he looked through her eyes thrilled him, warmed him as thoroughly as his mother’s embrace.

But as she approached him, her judgement changed. His posture was all coiled strength, but his face was drawn, his eyes distracted - he was not here entirely of his own free choice.  
 _  
She didn’t really know that when she saw me…  
_  
The analysis continued. Face drawn, eyes distracted - he glanced up at her too quickly, as prey that watches for a predator.

And he smiled. 

Yes, he remembered that smile - remembered smiling because they had sent him what was clearly the tenderest, most vulnerable piece of meat they could have found on a helicarrier filled with hardened soldiers. She had to have some training, so she was probably a little bit tougher than she looked, the innocence in those eyes was no lie...

His grin is feral and vicious, and everything he’d hoped for - he looked like one of the monsters he had met in the underworld, but with his own mind firmly in control behind that horrible smile.

And it is his mind that the woman is looking at now. He remembers this, too - remembers the wide sky-blue orbs of her eyes searching his, even as he was sizing up how best and most amusingly to destroy her.

In his mind’s eye, in that moment, had been the image of her flesh being rent - blood red on exposed pink muscle, that lovely mouth screaming - 

But in her eyes his own mind is unfurling, like a living sculpture. Curls and convolutions blossom from his skull the way his mother’s love had blossomed from the stone - dark, most of his mind is colored black like ink or smoke or obsidian, thoughts like lightning sparkling from rivulet to cloud to spire.

His eyes - the girls’ eyes, which he is now possessing - are riveted by gorgeous the architecture of the blackness. There are spires as lovely as those of Asgard, structures irregular and inexplicably compelling, sculptures more exquisite than anything he's seen in Odin's hall of relics, and - 

PAIN. A tendril of her mind slipped beneath the surface of his own, and Loki half-expected the Loki in the cage to fall to his knees, screaming, under the impact of what she found. 

Instead it is the girl who steps back, while the Loki in the cage remains oblivious.

“I - I’m sorry.” She whispers, and there are tears in her voice and her eyes are wet. “I am so sorry, Loki.” 

And now that he has seen what she claims to have seen, he understands - he can see that this little empath is already hopelessly infatuated with his mind, with the sculpture and the power and the paths of his thoughts, and she wants nothing more than to tear that howling, yawning void out of it. It makes sense that Odin would share this goal, for his own reasons.

Whatever the origin of the void the saw within him - if this vision is not a fabrication - she is now processing back down the aisle, fleeing him, seeing images of - 

She is seeing images of Loki writhing, bloodied, under Thanos’ boot.

All of Loki goes cold at that.  
 __  
How could she possibly know?  



End file.
